ORIGINS IN AMERICAN EDUCATION [Footnote 19]
[Footnote 19: The material for this address was collected for a lecture on the History of Education for the Sisters of Charity of Mount St. Vincent's, New York, and the Sacred Heart Academy, Kenwood, Albany, N. Y. Subsequently it was developed for an address to the parochial school teachers of New Orleans and for the summer normal courses of St. Mary's College, South Bend, Ind., and St. Mary's College, Monroe, Mich. Very nearly in its present form the address was delivered in a course at Boston College in the spring of 1910.]
Here in the United States we have been somewhat amazingly ignorant of our brother Americans of Mexico and of South America. Our ignorance has been so complete as to have the usual result of quite intolerant bigotry with regard to the significance of what was being done in these Spanish-American countries. A distinguished ex-president of one of our American universities said in his autobiography, that a favorite maxim of his for his own guidance was, "The man I don't like is the man I don't know." If we only know enough about people, we always find out quite enough about them that is admirable to make us like them. Whenever we are tempted to conclude that somebody is hopelessly insignificant then what we need to correct is our judgment by better knowledge of them. For most Americans, for we have arrogated to ourselves the title of Americans to the exclusion of any possible share [{300}] in it of our South American brethren, Spanish America has been so hopelessly backward, so out of all comparison with ourselves, as to be quite undeserving of our notice unless it be for profound deprecation.
Fortunately for us in recent years our knowledge of Spanish America has become larger and deeper and more genuine, and as a consequence there has been less assumption of knowledge founded on ignorance. Every gain in knowledge of Spanish America has raised Spanish America and her peoples in our estimation. Not long since at a public dinner the president of a great American university said, "We have only just discovered Spanish America." This is literally true. We have thought that we knew much about it, and that that much showed us how little deserving of our attention was Spanish America, while all the while a precious mine of information with regard to the beginnings of the history of education, of literature, of culture, nay, even of physical science on this continent, remained to be studied in these countries and not our own. Our scholars are now engaged in bringing together the materials out of which a real history of Spanish America can be constructed for their fellow-Americans of the North, and their surprise when it is placed before them is likely to be supreme. In the meantime there are some phases of this information that, I think, it will be interesting to bring together for you.
Josh Billings, writing as "Uncle Esek" in the Century Magazine some twenty-five years ago, made use of an expression which deserves to be frequently recalled. He said: "It is not so much the ignorance of mankind that makes them ridiculous as the knowin' so many things that ain't so." We have a very typical illustration of the wisdom of this fine old saw in the history of education here in America as it is being developed by scholarly historical research at the present time. The consultation of original documents and of first-hand authorities in the history of Spanish-American education has fairly worked a revolution in the ideas formerly held on this subject. The new developments bring out very forcibly how supremely necessary it is to know something definite about a subject before writing about it, and yet how many intelligent and supposedly educated men continue to talk about things with an assumption of knowledge when they know nothing at all about them.
Catholics are supposed by the generality of Americans to have come late into the field of education in this country. Whatever there is of education on this continent is ordinarily supposed to be due entirely to the efforts of what has been called the Anglo-Saxon element here. At last, however, knowledge is growing of what the Catholic Spaniards did for education in America and as a consequence the face of the history of education is being completely changed. Every [{302}] advance in history in recent years has made for the advantage of the Catholic Church. Modern historical methods insist on the consultation of original documents and give very little weight to the quotation of second-hand authorities. We are getting at enduring history as far as that is possible, and the real position of the Church is coming to light. In no portion of human accomplishment is the modification of history more striking than with regard to education. There was much more education in the past centuries than we have thought and the Catholic Church was always an important factor in it. Nowhere is this truth more striking than with regard to education here in America in the Spanish-American countries.
Professor Edward Gaylord Bourne, professor of history at Yale University, wrote the volume on Spain in America which constitutes the third volume of "The American Nation," a history of this country in twenty-seven volumes edited by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, who holds the chair of history at Harvard University. Professor Bourne has no illusions with regard to the relative value of Anglo-Saxon and Spanish education in this country. In his chapter on "The Transmission of European Culture" he says: "Early in the eighteenth century the Lima University (Lima, Peru) counted nearly two thousand students and numbered about one hundred and eighty doctors (in its faculty) in theology, civil and canon law, medicine and the arts." Ulloa [{303}] reports that "the university makes a stately appearance from without and its inside is decorated with suitable ornaments." There were chairs of all the sciences and "some of the professors have, notwithstanding the vast distance, gained the applause of the literati of Europe." "The coming of the Jesuits contributed much to the real educational work in America. They established colleges, one of which, the little Jesuit college at Juli, on Lake Titicaca, became a seat of genuine learning." (Bourne.)
He does not hesitate to emphasize the contrast between Spanish America and English America with regard to education and culture, and the most interesting feature of his comparison is that Spanish America surpassed the North completely and anticipated by nearly two centuries some of the progress that we are so proud of in the nineteenth century. What a startling paragraph, for instance, is the following for those who have been accustomed to make little of the Church's interest in education and to attribute the backwardness of South America, as they presumed they knew it, to the presence of the Church and her influence there.
"Not all the institutions of learning founded in Mexico in the sixteenth century can be enumerated here, but it is not too much to say that in number, range of studies and standard of attainments by the officers they surpassed anything existing in English America until the nineteenth [{304}] century. Mexican scholars made distinguished achievements in some branches of science, particularly medicine and surgery, but pre-eminently linguistics, history and anthropology. Dictionaries and grammars of the native languages and histories of the Mexican institutions are an imposing proof of their scholarly devotion and intellectual activity. Conspicuous are Toribio de Motolinia's 'Historia de las Indias de Nueva España,' Duran's 'Historia de las Indias de Nueva España,' but most important of all Sahagun's great work on Mexican life and religion."
Indeed, it is with regard to science in various forms that one finds the most surprising contributions from these old-time scholars. While the English in America were paying practically no attention to science, the Spaniards were deeply interested in it. Dr. Chança, a physician who had been for several years physician-in-ordinary to the King and Queen and was looked upon as one of the leaders of his profession in Spain, joined Columbus' second expedition in order to make scientific notes. The little volume that he issued as the report of this scientific excursion is a valuable contribution to the science of the time and furnishes precious information with regard to Indian medicine, Indian customs, their knowledge of botany and of metals, certain phases of zoology, and the like, that show how wide was the interest in science of this Spanish physician of over four hundred years ago.
After reading paragraphs such as Professor Bourne has written with regard to education in Spanish America, how amusing it is to reflect that one of the principal arguments against the Catholic Church has been that she keeps nations backward and unprogressive and uneducated--and the South American countries have been held up derisively and conclusively as horrible examples of this. Even we Catholics have been prone to take on an apologetic mood with regard to them. The teaching of history in English-speaking countries has been so untrue to the realities that we have accepted the impression that the Spanish-American countries were far behind in all the ways that were claimed. Now we find that instead of presenting grounds for apology they are triumphant examples of how soon and how energetically the Church gets to work at the great problems of education wherever she gains a position of authority or even a foothold of influence. Instead of needing to be ashamed of them, as we have perhaps ignorantly been, there is a reason to be deservedly proud of them. Their education far outstripped our own in all the centuries down to the nineteenth, and the culture of the Spanish-Americans, quite a different thing from education, is deeper than ours even at the present time. It is hard for North America to permit herself to be persuaded of this, but there is no doubt of its absolute truth.
It is only since the days of steam that the [{306}] English-speaking races in America have come to possess a certain material progress above that of the Spanish-American countries. Bourne says:
"If we compare Spanish America with the United States a hundred years ago we must recognize that while in the North there was a sounder body politic, a purer social life and a more general dissemination of elementary education, yet in Spanish America there were both vastly greater wealth and greater poverty, more imposing monuments of civilization, such as public buildings, institutions of learning and hospitals, more populous and richer cities, a higher attainment in certain branches of science. No one can read Humboldt's account of the City of Mexico and its establishments for the promotion of science and the fine arts without realizing that whatever may be the superiorities of the United States over Mexico in these respects, they have been mostly the gains of the age of steam."
While we are prone to think that a republican form of government is the great foster-mother of progress and that whatever development may have come in South American countries has been the result of the foundation of the South American republics, Professor Bourne is not of that opinion and is inclined to think that if the Spanish Colonial Government could have been maintained at its best until the coming of the age of steam or well on into the nineteenth century, then the South American republics would have been serious [{307}] rivals of the United States and have been kept from being so hampered as they were by their internal political dissensions. His paragraph on this matter is so contradictory of ordinary impressions, here in the United States particularly, that it seems worth while calling attention to it because it contains that most precious of suggestions, a thought that is entirely different from any that most people have had before. He says:
"During the first half-century after the application of steam to transportation Mexico weltered in domestic turmoils arising out of the crash of the old régime. If the rule of Spain could have lasted half a century longer, being progressively as it was during the reign of Charles III; if a succession of such viceroys as Revilla Gigedo, in Mexico, and De Croix and De Taboaday Lemos, in Peru, could have borne sway in America until railroads could have been built, intercolonial intercourse ramified and a distinctly Spanish-American spirit developed, a great Spanish-American federal state might possibly have been created, capable of self-defense against Europe, and inviting co-operation rather than aggression from the neighbor in the North."
Lima was the great centre for education in South America, and Mexico, in Spanish North America, was not far at all behind. The tracing of the steps of the development of education in Mexico emphasizes especially the difference between the Spaniards and the Englishmen in their [{308}] relation to the Indian. Bishop Zumaraga wanted a college for Indians in his bishopric, and it was because of this beneficent purpose that the first institution for higher education in the New World was founded as early as 1535. At that time the need for education for the whites was not felt so much, since only adults as a rule were in the colony, the number of children and growing youths being as yet very small. Accordingly, the College of Santa Cruz, in Tlaltelolco, one of the quarters of the City of Mexico reserved for the Indians, was founded under the bishop's patronage. Among the faculty were graduates of the University of Paris and of Salamanca, two of the greatest universities of Europe of this time, and they had not only the ambition to teach, but also to follow out that other purpose of a university--to investigate and write. Among them were such eminent scholars as Bernardino de Sahagun, the founder of American anthropology, and Juan de Torquemada, who is himself a product of Mexican education, whose "Monarquia Indiana" is a great storehouse of facts concerning Mexico before the coming of the whites, and precious details with regard to Mexican antiquities.
Knowing this, it is not surprising that the curriculum was broad and liberal. Besides the elementary branches and grammar and rhetoric, instruction was provided in Latin, philosophy, Mexican medicine, music, botany (especially with [{309}] reference to native plants), the zoology of Mexico, some principles of agriculture, and the native languages. It is not surprising to be told that many of the graduates of this college became Alcaldes and Governors in the Indian towns, and that they did much to spread civilization and culture among their compatriots. The English-speaking Americans furnished nothing of this kind, and our colleges for Indians came only in the nineteenth century. It is true that Harvard, according to its charter, was "for the education of the Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness," but the Indians were entirely neglected and no serious effort was ever made to give them any education. It was a son of the Puritans who said that his forefathers first fell on their knees and then on the aborigines, and the difference in the treatment of the Indians by the English and the Spaniards is a marked note in all their history.
During the next few years schools were established also for the education of mestizo children, that is, of the mixed race who are now called Creoles. In fact, in 1536 a fund from the Royal Exchequer was given for the teaching of these children. Strange as it may seem, for we are apt to think that the teaching of girls is a modern idea, schools were also established for Indian girls. All of these schools continued to flourish, and gradually spread beyond the City of Mexico itself into the villages of the Indians. As a [{310}] matter of fact, wherever a mission was established a school was also founded. Every town, Indian as well as Spanish, was by law required to have its church, hospital and school for teaching Indian children Spanish and the elements of religion. The teaching and parish work in the Indian villages was in charge of two or more friars, as a rule, and was well done. The remains of the monasteries with their magnificent Spanish-American architecture, are still to be seen in many portions of Mexico and of the Spanish territories that have been incorporated with the United States, in places where they might be least expected, and they show the influence for culture and education that gradually extended all over the Mexican country.
In the course of time the necessity for advanced teaching for the constantly growing number of native whites began to be felt, and so during the fifth decade of the sixteenth century a number of schools for them came into existence in the City of Mexico. The need was felt for some central institution. Accordingly, the Spanish Crown was petitioned to establish authoritatively a university. Such a step would have been utterly out of the question in English America, because the Crown was so little interested in colonial affairs. In the Spanish country, however, the Crown was deeply interested in making the colonists feel that though they were at a distance from the centre of government, their rulers were interested in [{311}] securing for them, as far as possible, all the opportunities of life at home in Spain. This is so different from what is ordinarily presumed to have been the attitude of Spain towards its colonies as to be quite a surprise for those who have depended on old-fashioned history, but there can be no doubt of its truth. Accordingly, the University of Mexico received its royal charter the same year as the University of Lima (1551). Mexico was not formally organized as a university until 1553. In the light of these dates, it is rather amusing to have the Century Dictionary, under the word Harvard University, speak of that institution as the oldest and largest institution of learning in America. It had been preceded by almost a century, not only in South America, but also in North America. The importance of Harvard was as nothing compared to the universities of Lima and Mexico, and indeed for a century after its foundation Harvard was scarcely more than a small theological school, with a hundred or so of pupils, sometimes having no graduating class, practically never graduating more than eight or ten pupils, while the two Spanish-American universities counted their students by the thousand and their annual graduates by the hundred.
The reason for the success of these South American universities above that of Harvard is to be found in the fact that Harvard's sphere of usefulness was extremely limited because of [{312}] religious differences and shades of differences. This had hampered all education in Protestant countries very seriously. Professor Paulsen, who holds the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, calls attention to the fact that the Reformation had anything but the effect of favoring education that has often been said. The picture that he draws of conditions in Germany a century before the foundation of Harvard would serve very well as a lively prototype of the factors at work in preventing Harvard from becoming such an educational institution as the universities of Lima and Mexico so naturally became. He says, in "German Universities and University Studies": "During this period [after Luther's revolt] a more determined effort was made to control instruction than at any period before or since. The fear of heresy, the extraordinary anxiety to keep instruction well within orthodox lines, was not less intense at the Lutheran than at the Catholic institutions; perhaps it was even more so, because here doctrine was not so well established, apostasy was possible in either of two directions, toward Catholicism or Calvinism. Even the philosophic faculty felt the pressure of this demand for correctness of doctrines. Thus came about these restrictions within the petty states and their narrow-minded established churches which well-nigh stifled the intellectual life of the German people."
Because of this and the fact that the attendance [{313}] at the college did not justify it, the school of medicine at Harvard was not opened until after the Revolution (1783). The law school was not opened until 1817.
This is sometimes spoken of as the earliest law school connected with a university on this continent, but, of course, only by those who know nothing at all about the history of the Spanish-American universities. In the Spanish countries the chairs in law were established very early; indeed, before those of medicine. Canon law was always an important subject in Spanish universities, and civil law was so closely connected with it that it was never neglected.
When the charter of the University of Lima was granted by the Emperor Charles V, in 1551, the town was scarcely more than fifteen years old. It had been founded in 1535. Curiously enough, just about the same interval had elapsed between the foundation of the Massachusetts colony by the Pilgrims and the legal establishment of the college afterward known as Harvard by the General Court of the colony. It is evident that in both cases it was the needs of the rising generation who had come to be from twelve to sixteen years of age that led to the establishment of these institutions of higher education. The actual foundation of Harvard did not come for two years later, and the intention of the founders was not nearly so broad as that of the founders of the University of Lima. Already at Lima schools had been [{314}] established by the religious orders, and it was with the idea of organizing the education as it was being given that the charter from the Crown was obtained. With regard to both Lima and Mexico, within a few years a bull of approval and confirmation was asked and obtained from the Pope. The University of Lima continued to develop with wonderful success. In the middle of the seventeenth century it had more than a thousand students, at the beginning of the eighteenth it had two thousand students, and there is no doubt at all of its successful accomplishment of all that a university is supposed to do.
Juan Antonio Ribeyro, who was the rector of the University of Lima forty years ago, said in the introduction to "The University Annals for 1869" that, "It cannot be denied that the University of Peru during its early history filled a large role of direct intervention for the formation of laws, for the amelioration of customs and in directing all the principal acts of civil and private society, forming the religious beliefs, rendering them free from superstitions and errors and influencing all the institutions of the country to the common good." Certainly this is all that would be demanded of a university as an influence for uplift, and the fact that such an ideal should have been cherished shows how well the purpose of an educational institution had been realized.
The scholarly work done by some of these professors at Spanish-American universities still [{315}] remains a model of true university work. It is the duty of the university to add to knowledge as well as to disseminate it. That ideal of university existence is supposed to be a creation of the nineteenth century, and indeed is often said to have been brought into the history of education by the example of the German universities. We find, however, that the professors of the Spanish-American universities accomplished much in this matter and that their works remain as precious storehouses of information for after generations. Professor Bourne has given but a short list of them in addition to those that have already been mentioned, but even this furnishes an excellent idea of how much the university professors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spanish America were taking to heart the duty of gathering, arranging and classifying knowledge for after generations. They did more in the sciences than in anything else. It is often thought that our knowledge of the ethnology and anthropology of the Indians is entirely the creation of recent investigators, but that is true only if one leaves out of account the work of these old Spanish-American scholars. Professor Bourne says:
"The most famous of the earlier Peruvian writers were Acosta, the historian, the author of the 'Natural and Civil History of the Indies'; the mestizo Garciasso de la Vega, who was educated in Spain and wrote of the Inca Empire and De Soto's expedition; Sandoval, the author of the [{316}] first work on Africa and the negro written in America; Antonio Leon Pinelo, the first American bibliographer, and one of the greatest as well of the indefatigable codifiers of the old legislation of the Indies. Pinelo was born in Peru and educated at the Jesuit College in Lima, but spent his literary life in Spain."
Of the University of Mexico more details are available than of Peru, and the fact that it was situated here in North America and that the culture which it influenced has had its effect on certain portions of the United States, has made it seem worth while to devote considerable space to it. The University was called the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, because, while it was founded under the charter of the King of Spain, this had been confirmed by a bull from the Pope, who took the new university directly under the patronage of the Holy See. The reason for the foundation of the university, as the men at that time saw it, is contained in the opening chapter of St. John's Gospel, which is quoted as the preamble of the constitutions of the university: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him and without Him was made nothing that was made. In Him was Life, and the Life was the light of men." This they considered ample reason for the erection of a university and the spread of knowledge with God's own sanction.
The patron saints of the university, as so declared by the first article of the constitutions, were St. Paul the Apostle, and St. Catherine the Martyr. Among the patrons, however, were also mentioned in special manner two other saints--St. John Nepomucen, who died rather than reveal the secrets of the confessional, and St. Aloysius Gonzaga, the special patron of students. It is evident that these two patrons had been chosen with a particular idea that devotion to them would encourage the practice of such virtues and devotion to duty as would be especially useful to the students, clerical and secular, of the university. On all four of the feast days of these patrons the university had a holiday. This would seem to be adding notably to the number of free days in a modern university, but must have meant very little at the University of Mexico, they had so many other free days. The most striking difference between the calendar of the University of Mexico and that of a modern university would be the number of days in the year in which no lectures were given. There were some forty of these altogether. Besides the four patron saint days, the feast day of every Apostle was a holiday. Besides these, all the Fathers and Doctors of the Church gave reasons for holidays. Then there was St. Sebastian's Day, in order that young men might be brave, St. Joseph's Day, the Annunciation, the Expectation, the Assumption and the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, the [{318}] Invention of the Holy Cross, the Three Rogation Days and the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows. Besides, there were St. Magdalen's, St. Ann's, St. Ignatius' and St. Lawrence's Day. These were not all, but this will give an idea how closely connected with the Church were the lectures at the university, or, rather, the intermission from the lectures. It might be said that this was a serious waste of precious time, and that our universities in the modern time would not think of imitating them, but such a remark could come but from some one who did not realize the real condition that obtained in the old-time universities. At the present time our universities finish their scholastic year about the middle of May and do not begin again until October--nearly twenty weeks. At these old universities their annual intermission between scholastic years lasted only the six weeks from the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, September 8, to St Luke's Day, October 18. They had five weeks at Easter time and two weeks at Christmas time. They spread their year out over a longer period and compensated for shorter vacations by granting holidays during the year. Their year's labor was less intense and spread out over more ground than ours.
The development of the University of Mexico into a real university in the full sense of the old studium generale, in which all forms of human knowledge might be pursued, is very interesting [{319}] and shows the thoroughgoing determination of the Spanish Americans to make for themselves and their children an institute of learning worthy of themselves and their magnificent new country.
Chartered in 1551, it was not formally opened until 1553. Chairs were established in this year in theology, Sacred Scripture, canon law and decretals, laws, art, rhetoric and grammar. Both Spanish and Latin were taught in the classes of grammar and rhetoric. To these was added very shortly a chair in Mexican Indian languages, in accordance with the special provisions of the imperial charter. The university continued to develop and added further chairs and departments as time went on. It had a chair of jurisprudence at the beginning, but its law department was completed in 1569 by the addition of two other chairs, one in the institutes of law, the other in codes of law. In the meantime the university had begun to make itself felt as a corporate body for general uplift by publications of various kinds. Its professor of rhetoric, Dr. Cervantes Salazer, published in 1555 three interesting Latin dialogues in imitation of Erasmus' dialogues. At the moment Erasmus' "Colloquia" was the most admired academic work in the university world of the time. The first of these dialogues described the University of Mexico, and the other two, taking up Mexico City and its environments, gave an excellent idea of [{320}] what the Spanish-American capital of Mexico was three centuries and a half ago.
"The early promoters of education and missions did not rely upon the distant European presses for the publication of their manuals. The printing press was introduced into the New World probably as early as 1536, and it seems likely that the first book, an elementary Christian doctrine called 'La Escala Espiritual' (the ladder of the spirit), was issued in 1537. No copy of it, however, is known to exist. Seven different printers plied their craft in New Spain in the sixteenth century. Among the notable issues of these presses, besides the religious works and church service works, were dictionaries and grammars of the Mexican languages, Puga's 'Cedulario' in 1563, a compilation of royal ordinances, Farfan's 'Tractado de Medicina.' In 1605 appeared the first text-book published in America for instruction in Latin, a manual of poetics with illustrative examples from heathen and Christian poets." (Bourne.)
With the light thrown on the early history of printing on this continent by a paragraph like this, how amusing it is to be told that the tradition among the printers and the publishers and even the bibliophiles of the United States is that the first book printed in America was the Massachusetts Bay Psalm Book printed, I believe, in 1637. There were no less than seven printing presses at work in Mexico during the sixteenth [{321}] century, fully fifty years before the Massachusetts Bay Psalm Book was issued. How interesting it is for those who still like to insist that the Catholic Church is opposed to the distribution of the Scriptures to the people or its printing in the vernacular, to find how many editions of it were printed in Mexico and in South America during the sixteenth century. This story of the printing press in Spanish America in the early days would of itself make a most interesting chapter in a volume on American origins, which could probably be extended into a very valuable little manual of bibliography and bibliophilic information that would arouse new interest in the accumulation of early American books.
The university had been founded just twenty-five years when provision was made for the establishment of the medical department. According to most of the chronicles the first chair in medicine was founded June 21, 1578, although there are some authorities who state that this establishment came only in 1580. I am a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School myself, and I yield to none of her sons in veneration for my Alma Mater, but I cannot pass over this statement of the foundation of the medical school in Mexico without recalling that we have been rather proud at the University of Pennsylvania to be known as the First American Medical School. This is, of course, only due to our fond United States way of assuming [{322}] ourselves to be all America and utterly neglecting any knowledge of Spanish America. I believe that there are tablets erected at the University of Pennsylvania chronicling our priority. One of them is to the first graduating class, the other to the first faculty of the medical school. I believe that between the erection of the two tablets there had come to be some suspicion of the possibility that South America was ahead of us in this respect and so the second tablet specifically mentions North America. When I talked some time ago before the College of Physicians of Philadelphia on this subject one of my friends, who was a teacher at the university, asked me what they should do with their tablets. I suggested that, by all means, they should be allowed to remain, and that as soon as possible an opportunity should be secured to erect the third tablet containing a statement of the real facts with regard to the place of the University of Pennsylvania as the protagonist in medicine in the United States. The tablets will then serve to show the gradual evolution of our knowledge of the true history of medical education in this country. It is all the more important that this should be the arrangement because the University of Pennsylvania has been a leader in "the discovery" of South America that has been made by us in the last few years.
Between the date of the foundation of the first chair in medicine at the beginning of the [{323}] last quarter of the sixteenth century and the foundation of the city, Mexico had not been without provision of physicians. In the very first year of the existence of the University of Mexico, though there was no formal faculty of medicine, two doctors received their degrees in medicine from the university. They had been students in Spain and were able to satisfy the faculty of their ability. This shows that the institution was considered to have the power to confer these degrees upon those who brought evidence of having completed the necessary studies, though it was not in a position to provide facilities for these studies. It is evident that this custom continued in subsequent years until the necessity for medical studies at home became evident. The intimate connection between the universities of old Spain and of New Spain is a very interesting subject in the educational history of the time. Even before the foundation of the university, however, definite efforts were made by the authorities to secure proper medical service for the colonists and to prevent their exploitation by quacks and charlatans.
Strict medical regulations were established by the Municipal Council of the City of Mexico in 1527 so as to prevent quacks from Europe, who might think to exploit the ills of the settlers in the new colony, from practising medicine. Licenses to practise were issued only to those who showed the possession of a university degree. [{324}] This strict regulation of medical practice was extended also to the apothecaries in 1529. Even before this, arrangements had been made for the regular teaching of barber-surgeons, so that injuries and wounds of various kinds might be treated properly, and so that emergencies might be promptly met, even in the absence of a physician, by these barber-surgeons. Dr. Bandelier, in his article on Francisco Bravo in the second volume of the Catholic Encyclopedia, calls attention to some important details with regard to medicine in Mexico in the early part of the sixteenth century, and especially to this distinguished physician who published the first book on medicine in that city in 1570.
Three years before that time Dr. Pedrarius de Benavides had published his "Secretos de Chirurgia" at Valladolid, in Spain, a work which had been written in America and contained an immense amount of knowledge that is invaluable with regard to Indian medicinal practice. Dr. Bravo's work, however, has the distinction of being the first medical treatise printed in America.
The issuance of these books shows the intense interest in medicine in the sixteenth century, but there are other details which serve to show how thorough and practical were the efforts of the authorities in securing the best possible medical practice. In 1524 there was founded in the City of Mexico a hospital, which still stands and which was a model in its way. That way was [{325}] much better than the mode of the construction of hospitals in the eighteenth century, for instance, when hospitals and care for the ailing reached the lowest ebb in modern times. Other hospitals besides this foundation by Cortez soon arose, and the wards of these hospitals were used for purposes of clinical teaching. Clinical or bedside teaching in medicine is supposed to be a comparatively recent feature of medical education. There are traces of it, however, at all times in history and while at times when theory ruled the practical application of observation waned, it was constantly coming back whenever men took medical education seriously. Its employment in Mexico seems to have been an obvious development of their very practical methods, which began with the teaching of first aid to the injured and developed through special studies of the particular diseases of the country and of the methods of curing them by native drugs.
A chair of botany existed already in connection with the university, and this, with the lectures on medicine, constituted the medical training until 1599, when a second medical lectureship was added. During the course of the next twenty years altogether seven chairs in medicine were founded, so that besides the two lectureships in medicine there was a chair of anatomy and surgery, a special chair of dissection, a chair of therapeutics, the special duty of which was to lecture on Galen "De Methodo Medendi," a [{326}] chair of mathematics and astrology, for the stars were supposed to influence human constitutions by all the learned men of this time and even Kepler and Galileo and Tycho-Brahe were within this decade making horoscopes for important people in Europe, and, finally, a chair of prognostics. Most of the teaching was founded on Hippocrates and Galen, and lest this should seem sufficient to condemn it as hopelessly backward in the minds of many, it may be recalled that during the century following this time Sydenham, in England, and Boerhaave, in Holland, the most distinguished medical men of their time and looked on with great reverence by the teachers of ours, were both of them pleading for a return to Hippocrates and Galen. As a matter of fact, the medical school of the University of Mexico was furnishing quite as good a medical training as the average medical school in Europe at that time, at least so far as the subjects lectured on are concerned. Indeed, it was modelled closely after the Spanish universities, which were considered well up to the standard of the time.
In the meantime additional chairs in university subjects continued to be founded. Another chair in arts was established in 1586, and further chairs in law and grammar were added at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Spanish Crown was very much interested in Mexican education, and King Philip II of Spain, who is usually mentioned in English history for quite [{327}] other qualities than his interest in culture and education, was especially liberal in his provision from the Crown revenues of funds for the university. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, according to Flores in his "History of Medicine in Mexico from the Indian Times Down to the Present," the total amount of income from the Crown allowed the University of Mexico was nearly $10,000. This was about Shakespeare's time, and so we have readily available calculations as to the buying power of money at that time compared to our own. It is usually said that the money of Elizabeth's time had eight to ten times the trading value of ours. This would mean that the University of Mexico had nearly an income of $100,000 apart from fees and other sources of revenue. This would not be considered contemptible even in our own day for a university having less than twenty professorships.
The number of students at the University of Mexico is not absolutely known, but, as we have seen, Professor Bourne calculates that the University of Lima had at the beginning of the eighteenth century more than 2,000 students. The University of Mexico at the same time probably had more than 1,000 students, and both of these universities were larger in number than any institution of learning within the boundaries of the present United States until after the middle of the nineteenth century. After all, we began to have universities in the real sense of [{328}] that word--that is, educational institutions giving opportunities in undergraduate work and the graduate departments of law, medicine and theology--not until nearly the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Our medical and law schools did not, as a rule, become attached to our universities until the second half of the nineteenth century, and even late in that. This was to the serious detriment of post-graduate work, and especially detrimental to the preliminary training required for it, and consequently to the products of these schools.
Before a student could enter one of the post-graduate departments at the University of Mexico in law or medicine, he was required to have made at least three years of studies in the undergraduate departments. When we contrast this regulation with the custom in the United States, the result is a little startling. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century students might enter our medical schools straight from the plow or the smithy or the mechanic's bench, and without any preliminary education, after two terms of medical lectures consisting of four months each, be given a degree which was a license to practise medicine. The abuses of such a system are manifest, and actually came into existence. They were not permitted in Mexico even in the seventeenth century.
It might perhaps be thought that these magnificent opportunities in education were provided [{329}] only for the higher classes, or concerned only book learning and the liberal and professional studies. Far from any such exclusiveness as this, their schools were thoroughly rounded and gave instruction in the arts and crafts and recognized the value of manual training. We have only come to appreciate in the last few decades how much we have lost in education in America by neglecting these features of education for the masses. While Germany has manual training for over fifty per cent. of the children who go to her schools, here in the United States we provide it for something less than one per cent, of our children. They made no such mistake as this in the Spanish-American countries. Indeed, Professor Bourne's paragraph on this subject is perhaps the most interesting feature of what he has to say with regard to education in Spanish America. The objective methods of education, as he depicts them, the thoroughly practical content of education, and the fact that the Church was one of the main factors in bringing about this well-rounded education, is of itself a startling commentary on the curiously perverted notions that have been held in the past with regard to the comparative value of education in Spanish and in English America and the attitude of the Church toward these educational questions:
"Both the Crown and the Church were solicitous for education in the colonies, and provisions were made for its promotion on a far greater [{330}] scale than was possible or even attempted in the English colonies. The early Franciscan missionaries built a school beside each church, and in their teaching abundant use was made of signs, drawings and paintings. The native languages were reduced to writing, and in a few years Indians were learning to read and write. Pedro de Gante, a Flemish lay brother and a relative of Charles V, founded and conducted in the Indian quarter in Mexico a great school, attended by over a thousand Indian boys, which combined instruction in elementary and higher branches, the mechanical and fine arts. In its workshops the boys were taught to be tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers and painters."
If there was all this of progress in education in Spanish-American countries in advance of what we had in the United States, people will be prone to ask where, then, are the products of the Spanish-American education? This is only a fair question, and if the products cannot be shown, their education, however pretentious, must have been merely superficial or hollow, and must have meant nothing for the culture of their people. We are sure that most people would consider the question itself quite sufficient for argument, for it would be supposed to be unanswerable.
Such has been the state of mind created by history as it is written for English-speaking people, that we are not at all prepared to think that there [{331}] can possibly be in existence certain great products of Spanish-American education that show very clearly how much better educational systems were developed in Spanish than in English America. The fact that we do not know them, however, is only another evidence of the one-sidedness of American education in the North, even at the present time. Our whole attitude toward the South American people, our complacent self-sufficiency from which we look down on them, our thoroughgoing condescension for their ignorance and backwardness, is all founded on our lack of real knowledge with regard to them.
The most striking product of South American education was the architectural structures which the Spanish-American people erected as ornaments of their towns, memorials of their culture and evidences of their education. The cathedrals in the Spanish towns of South America and Mexico are structures, as a rule, fairly comparable with the ecclesiastical buildings erected by towns of the same size in Europe. As a rule, they were planned at least in the sixteenth century, and most of them were finished in the seventeenth century. Their cathedrals are handsome architectural structures worthy of their faith and enduring evidence of their taste and love of beauty. The ecclesiastical buildings, the houses of their bishops and archbishops and their monasteries were worthy of their cathedrals and churches. Most of them are beautiful, all of them are dignified, all of them had [{332}] a permanent character that has made them endure down to our day and has made them an unfailing ornament of the towns in which they are. Their municipal buildings partook of this same type. Some of them are very handsome structures. Of their universities we have already heard that they were imposing buildings from without, handsomely decorated within.
It must not be forgotten that the Spanish Americans practically invented the new style of architecture. How effective that style is, we had abundant opportunity to see when it was employed for the building of the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo. That style is essentially American. It is the only new thing that America has contributed to construction since its settlement. How thoroughly suitable it was for the climate for which it was invented, those who have had experience of it in the new hotels erected in Florida, in the last decade or so, can judge very well. Many of its effects are an adaptation of classical formulae to buildings for the warm, yet uncertain climate of many parts of South America. Some of the old monasteries constructed after this style are beautiful examples of architecture in every sense of the word. If the Spanish-American monks had done nothing else but leave us this handsome new model in architecture they would not have lived in vain, nor would their influence in American life have been without its enduring effects. This is a typical [{333}] product of the higher culture of the South Spanish-American people.
With regard to the churches, it may be said that the spirit of the Puritans was entirely opposed to anything like the ornamentation of their churches, and that, indeed, these were not churches in the usual sense of the word, but were merely meeting houses. Hence there was not the same impulse to make them beautiful as lifted the Spanish Americans into their magnificent expressions of architectural beauty. On the other hand, there are other buildings in regard to which, if there had been any real culture in the minds of the English Americans, we have a right to expect some beauty as well as usefulness. If we contrast for a moment the hospitals of English and Spanish America the difference is so striking as to show the lack of some important quality in the minds of the builders at the north. Spanish-American hospitals are among the beautiful structures with which they began to adorn their towns early, and some of them remain at the present day as examples of the architectural taste of their builders. They were usually low, often of but one story in height, with a courtyard and with ample porticos for convalescents, and thick walls to defend them from the heat of the climate. In many features they surpass many hospitals that have been built in America until very recent years. They were modelled on the old mediaeval hospitals, some of which are very beautiful [{334}] examples of how to build places for the care of the ailing.
Contrast for a moment with this the state of affairs that has existed with regard to our church buildings and our public structures of all kinds in North America, down to the latter half of the nineteenth century. We have no buildings dating from before the nineteenth century that have any pretension to architectural beauty. They were built merely for utility. Some of them still have an interest for us because of historical associations, but they are a standing evidence of the lack of taste of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The English poet, Yeats, said at a little dinner given to him just before he left this country ten years ago, that no nation can pretend to being cultured until the very utensils in the kitchen are beautiful as well as useful. What is to be said, then, of a nation that erects public buildings that are to be merely useful? As a matter of fact, most of them were barracks. The American people woke up somewhat in the nineteenth century, but the awakening was very slow. A few handsome structures were erected, but it is not until the last decade or two that we have been able to awaken public taste to the necessity for having all our public buildings beautiful as well as useful.
The effect of this taste for structural beauty on the appearance of the streets of their towns was an important element in making them very different from our cramped and narrow pathways. [{335}] The late Mr. Ernest Crosby once expressed this very emphatically in an after-dinner speech, by detailing his experience with regard to Havana. He had visited the Cuban capital some twenty years ago, and found it very picturesque in its old Spanish ways. It is true the streets were dirty and the death-rate was somewhat high, but the vista that you saw when you came around the corner of a street, was not the same that you had seen around every other corner for twenty miles; it was different. It was largely a city of homes, with some thought of life being made happy, rather than merely being laborious. It was a place to live in and enjoy life while it lasted, and not merely a place to exist in and make money. He came north by land. The first town that he struck on the mainland, he said, reminded him of Hoboken. Every other town that he struck in the North reminded him more and more of Hoboken, until he came to the immortal Hoboken itself. The American end of the Anglo-Saxon idea seemed to him to make all the towns like Hoboken as far as possible. There is only one town in this country that is not like Hoboken, and that is Washington; and whenever we let the politicians work their wills on that--witness the Pension Building--it has a tendency to grow more and more like Hoboken. Perhaps we shall be able to save it. As for Havana, he said he understood that the death-rate had been cut in two, and that yellow fever was no longer [{336}] epidemic there, but he understood also that the town was growing more and more like Hoboken, so that he scarcely dared go back to see it.
The parable has a lesson that is well worth driving home for our people, for it emphasizes a notable lack of culture among the American people, which did not exist among the Spanish Americans, a lack which we did not realize until the last decade or two, though it is an important index of true culture. The hideous buildings that we have allowed ourselves to live in in America, and, above all, that we have erected as representing the dignity of city, and only too often even of state, together with the awful evidence of graft, whenever an attempt has been made to correct this false taste and erect something worthy of us, the graft usually spoiling to a very great extent our best purposes, proclaim an absence of culture in American life that amounts to a conviction of failure of our education to be liberal in the true sense of the word.
There were other products of Spanish-American education quite as striking as the architectural beauties with which Mexicans and South Americans adorned their towns. Quite as interesting, indeed, as their architecture is their literature. Ordinarily we are apt to assume that because we have heard almost nothing of Spanish-American literature, there must be very little of it, and what little there is must have very little significance. This is only another one of these examples [{337}] of how ridiculous it is to know something "that ain't so." Spanish-American literature is very rich. It begins very early in the history of the Spanish settlement. It is especially noteworthy for its serious products, and when the world's account of the enduring literature of the past four centuries will be made up much more of what was written in South America will live than what has been produced in North America. This seems quite unpatriotic, but it is only an expression of proper estimation of values, without any of that amusing self-complacency which so commonly characterizes North American estimation of anything that is done by our people.
South American literature, in the best sense of that much abused term, begins shortly after the middle of the sixteenth century, with the writing of the Spanish poet, Ercilla's, epic, "Araucana," which was composed in South America during the decade from 1550 to 1560. This is a literary work of genuine merit, that has attracted the attention of critics and scholars of all kinds and has given its author a significant place even in the limited field of epic poetry among the few great names that the world cares to recall in this literary mode. Voltaire considered this epic poem a great contribution to literature, and in the prefatorial essay to his own epic, the "Henriade," he praises it very highly. The poem takes its name from the Araucanos Indians, who had risen in revolt against the Spaniards in Chile, and [{338}] against whom the poet served for nearly ten years. He did not learn to despise them, and while the literature which does justice to the lofty sentiments which sometimes flowed from mouths of great Indian chiefs, is supposed to be much more recent, Ercilla's most enthusiastically extolled passage is the noble speech which he has given to the aged chief, Colocolo, in the "Araucana."
The expedition against the Araucanos inspired two other fine poems--that of Pedro de Ona, "Arauco Domado," written near the end of the century, and "Araucana," written by Diego de Santisteban, whose poem also saw the light before the seventeenth century opened. A fourth poet, Juan de Castellanos, better than either of these, wrote "Elegias de Varones Ilustres de Indias." He was a priest who had served in America, and who remembered some of the magnificent traits of the Indians that he had observed during his life among them, and made them the subject of his poetry. This was only the beginning of a serious Spanish-American literature, that has continued ever since. Father Charles Warren Currier, in a series of lectures at the Catholic Summer School three years ago, did not hesitate to say that the body of Spanish-American literature was much larger and much more important, and much more of it was destined to endure than of our English-American literature. In the light of what these Spaniards had done for education in their universities, and for the beauty of life in [{339}] their cities by their architecture, this is not so surprising a saying as it might otherwise be. All of these things stand together and are confirmations one of the other.
The most interesting product of Spanish-American education, however,--the one which shows that it really stood for a higher civilization than ours,--remains to be spoken of. It consists of their treatment of the Indians. From the very beginning, as we have just shown, their literature in Spanish America did justice to the Indians. They saw his better traits. It is true they had a better class of Indians, as a rule, to deal with, but there is no doubt also that they did much to keep him on a higher level, while everything in North America that was done by the settlers was prone to reduce the native in the scale of civilization. He was taught the vices and not the virtues of civilization, and little was attempted to uplift him. Just as the literary men were interested in the better side of his character, so the Spanish-American scientists were interested in his folklore, in his medicine, in his arts and crafts, in his ethnology and anthropology--in a word, in all that North Americans have only come to be interested in during the nineteenth century. Books on all these subjects were published, and now constitute a precious fund of knowledge with regard to the aborigines that would have been lost only for the devotion of Spanish-American scholars.
It is not surprising, then, that the Indian [{340}] himself, with all this interest in him, did not disappear, as in North America, but has remained to constitute the basis of South American peoples. If the South American peoples are behind our own in anything, it is because large elements in them have been raised from a state of semi-barbarism into civilization, while our people have all come from nations that were long civilized and we have none at all of the natives left. Wherever the English went always the aborigines disappeared before them. The story is the same in New Zealand and Australia as it is in North America, and it would be the same in India, only for the teeming millions that live in that peninsula, for whom Anglo-Saxon civilization has never meant an uplift in any sense of the word, but rather the contrary. The white man's burden has been to carry the Indian, instilling into him all the vices, until no longer he could cling to his shifty master and was shaken off to destruction.
This story of the contrast of the treatment of the Indian at the North and the South is probably the best evidence for the real depth of culture that the magnificent education of the Spaniards, so early and so thoroughly organized in their colonies, accomplished for this continent. Alone it would stand as the highest possible evidence of the interest of the Spanish Government and the Spanish Church in the organization not only of education, but of government in such a way as to bring happiness and uplift for [{341}] both natives and colonists in the Spanish-American countries. Abuses there were, as there always will be where men are concerned and where a superior race comes in contact with an inferior. These abuses, however, were exceptions and not the rule. The policy instituted by the Spaniards and maintained in spite of the tendencies of men to degenerate into tyranny and misuse of the natives is well worthy of admiration. English-speaking history has known very little of it until comparatively recent years. Mr. Sidney Lee, the editor of the English Biographical Dictionary and the author of a series of works on Shakespeare which has gained for him recognition as probably the best living authority on the history of the Elizabethan times, wrote a series of articles which appeared in Scribner's last year on "The Call of the West." This was meant to undo much of the prejudice which exists in regard to Spanish colonization in this country and to mitigate the undue reverence in which the English explorers and colonists have been held by comparison. There seems every reason to think, then, that this newer, truer view of history is gradually going to find its way into circulation. In the meantime it is amusing to look back and realize how much prejudice has been allowed to warp English history in this matter, and how, as a consequence of the determined, deliberate efforts to blacken the Spanish name, we have had to accept as history exactly the opposite view to the [{342}] reality in this matter. Lest we should be thought to be exaggerating, we venture to quote one of the opening paragraphs of Mr. Sidney Lee's article as it appeared in Scribner's for May, 1907: "Especially has theological bias justified neglect or facilitated misconception of Spain's role in the sixteenth century drama of American history. Spain's initial adventures in the New World are often consciously or unconsciously overlooked or underrated in order that she may figure on the stage of history as the benighted champion of a false and obsolete faith, which was vanquished under divine protecting Providence by English defenders of the true religion. Many are the hostile critics who have painted sixteenth century Spain as the avaricious accumulator of American gold and silver, to which she had no right, as the monopolist of American trade, of which she robbed others, and as the oppressor and exterminator of the weak and innocent aborigines of the new continent who deplored her presence among them. Cruelty in all its hideous forms is, indeed, commonly set forth as Spain's only instrument of rule in her sixteenth century empire. On the other hand, the English adventurer has been credited by the same pens with a touching humanity, with the purest religious aspirations, with a romantic courage which was always at the disposal of the oppressed native.
"No such picture is recognized when we apply the touchstone of the oral traditions, printed [{343}] books, maps and manuscripts concerning America which circulated in Shakespeare's England. There a predilection for romantic adventure is found to sway the Spaniards in even greater degree than it swayed the Elizabethan. Religious zeal is seen to inspirit the Spaniards more constantly and conspicuously than it stimulated his English contemporary. The motives of each nation are barely distinguishable one from another. Neither deserves to be credited with any monopoly of virtue or vice. Above all, the study of contemporary authorities brings into a dazzling light which illumes every corner of the picture the commanding facts of the Spaniard's priority as explorer, as scientific navigator, as conqueror, as settler."
Here is magnificent praise from one who cannot be suspected of national or creed affinities to bias his judgment. He has studied the facts and not the prejudiced statements of his countrymen. The more carefully the work of the Spaniards in America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is studied, the more praise is bestowed upon them. The more a writer knows of actual conditions the more does he feel poignantly the injustice that has been done by the Protestant tradition which abused the good that was accomplished by the Catholic Spanish and which neglected, distorted and calumniated his deeds and motives. This bit of Protestant tradition is, after all, only suffering the fate that every other [{344}] Protestant position has undergone during the course of the development of scientific historical criticism. Every step toward the newer, truer history has added striking details to the picture of the beneficent influences of the Church upon her people in every way. It has shown up pitilessly the subterfuges, the misstatements and the positive ignorance which have enabled Protestantism to maintain the opposite impression in people's minds in order to show how impossible was agreement with the Catholic Church, since it stood for backwardness and ignorance and utter lack of sympathy with intellectual development. Now we find everywhere that just the opposite was true. Whenever the Reformation had the opportunity to exert itself to the full, education and culture suffered. Erasmus said in his time, "Wherever Lutheranism reigns there is an end of literature." Churches and cathedrals that used to be marvellous expressions of the artistic and poetic feeling of the people became the ugliest kind of mere meeting houses. Rev. Augustus Jessop, himself an Anglican clergyman, tells how "art died out in rural England" after the Reformation, which he calls The Great Pillage, and "King Whitewash and Queen Ugliness ruled supreme for centuries." The same thing happened in Germany, and education was affected quite as much as art. German national development was delayed, and she has come to take her place in world influence only in the nineteenth [{345}] century, after most of the influence of the religious revolt led by Luther in the sixteenth century has passed away. These are but a few of the striking differences in recent history that are so well typified by the contrast between what was accomplished for art and culture and architecture and education by the Catholic Spaniard and the English Protestant here in America during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Truth is coming to her own at last, and it is in the history of education particularly that advances are being made which change the whole aspect of the significance of history during the past 350 years.